The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in partnership with Carleton University and others will hold an inception workshop for the new project "Gender and Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining: Connecting Research with Extractive Sector Governance." The project aims to foster networks and policy dialogue on the gender dynamics of artisanal and small-scale mining in sub-Saharan Africa.

Primarily a working meeting of the partners to this project, the first day (Monday 27 August) is open to interested participants and will include a discussion on recent and emerging research on women’s livelihoods in artisanal and small-scale mining across multiple countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Participants will also discuss how best to mobilize this research for use by mining communities, national, sub-national and global policy audiences. 

This three-year partnership project (2018-2021), includes four universities - Carleton University, Canada,  University of Nairobi, Kenya, University of Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique, University of Sierra Leone, and Eileen Alma who is based at the Coady International institute, Canada; two civil society organizations - Forum Mulher in Mozambique, and the Network Movement for Justice and Development (NMJD) in Sierra Leone -  as well as international partners such ECA and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Sierra Leone. ECA is an important advisory partner on this project, providing   support and expert consultation on programmatic issues and reviewing training materials for their appropriateness for policy makers and CSO audiences.

The Project activities will include knowledge exchange, multi-stakeholder dialogue, training, and open access materials, to connect policy makers, researchers, civil society actors and mining communities in Kenya, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Ghana to the emerging research on gender and ASM. The objective of these activities is to help forge the conditions in which new research is conducted, and laws and policies developed to better reflect the lived realities of women in ASM. Among the planned activities of the Project, policy dialogue meetings with artisanal and small-scale mining communities come first followed by similar meetings with national government, donor and civil society, workshops with national CSOs and training workshop for researchers. The project is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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